Paw-abiding Bandit is home, a refugee no longer

On four paws and with tail wagging, one more New Orleans evacuee came home Thursday night.

One year after an animal rescue group carried him from an evacuation shelter on a sojourn that ended outside of Pittsburgh, a shaggy white poodle named Bandit returned to the 9th Ward and into the arms of his original owner.

"I told you he'd kiss me, " said Malvin Cavalier Sr., 86, as Bandit, standing on his hind legs, greeted him with a mushy lick.

It took an Internet blog campaign, a civil lawsuit and a heartfelt plea to bring Bandit home to Cavalier, who returned to his damaged home on Clouet Street earlier this month. Cavalier had lived in Houston since fleeing the Superdome (Katrina photos: Superdome) in the grueling days after the levees failed.

Accounts vary on exactly how one New Orleans pooch spent a year away from his owner, but the calendar doesn't lie. In that year, Cavalier and Bandit's journeys couldn't have been more harried. Cavalier lost his house, his possessions and then his sweet-tempered mutt to the disaster that caught an entire nation off-guard.

Cavalier, a retired sheet metal mechanic, left his 12-year-old dog on his covered porch with a bag of food and a bucket of water as the floodwaters rose on Aug. 29, 2005. Like so many others, Cavalier figured he would be back home soon.

"I figured I'd be back in a couple of days, " he said. "I was at the Superdome for six days. "Some people stayed with their pets and drowned."

Tears have ended

Bandit and his owner will live in a FEMA trailer parked outside the Clouet Street house that Cavalier bought 54 years ago. Although Cavalier built a doghouse for his canine friend, Bandit is an indoor dog, he said.

The post-Hurricane Katrina separation is over for Bandit and Cavalier, but it didn't come easily. Cavalier said he cried himself to sleep many nights because he missed the pooch that, since his wife died in 2003, had been a constant companion.

A New Orleans native with a gentle manner and a thin white mustache, Cavalier sees a little of himself in his dog.

"He's a mix, just like me, " Cavalier laughed, when asked if Bandit was a purebred poodle. "My grandfather was from Spain. I'm a full-blooded Creole."

How old is Bandit?

"He's my age, 86, " Cavalier said.

No hard feelings

With the help of some animal lovers who met Cavalier during the post-Katrina pet rescue and pet custody battles, Bandit returned safe and sound. Last Friday, the Pennsylvania couple who had adopted him from a Pittsburgh shelter caved in after months of negotiations.

"I don't have any ill feelings, " Cavalier said Thursday. "I'm a Christian. The lady wouldn't give Bandit up. I told her, I can understand, because you are a pet lover just like me and you just took a liking to Bandit."

Others are less diplomatic when it comes to the emerging arguments about who are the rightful owners of pets scattered across the country after New Orleans slipped underwater a year ago.

The post-Katrina pet custody battle has heightened in recent months, with costly lawsuits and emotional debates growing by the week across the country.

"Many adoptive parents are saying no, " said Laura Maloney, executive director of the Louisiana Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals. "That's because they feel the animal was abandoned in the first place. They may not know the circumstances. The person may have been on their roof and the dog wasn't allowed to go" with rescuers.

Pets were not allowed at the Superdome shelter.

"Shelters have limited capacity, " Maloney said. "In January, they were starting to adopt them out into foster care. It's understandable. Shelters can't hold animals. There is only so much space."

A culture clash may also play into the debate, Maloney said. In the New Orleans region, about 95 percent of dogs and cats are "sexually intact, " the LSPCA said, while in the rest of the country the average is about 28 percent. Many New Orleans animals seen at the local shelter also test positive for heartworms.

One for the books

Katrina also is likely to create new case law when it comes to pet adoptions.

The state attorney general's office has said that such evacuated animals are lost, not abandoned, property under Louisiana law, and that pet owners have three years to claim their property.

But parishes have ordinances of their own when it comes to dogs, cats and other household pets.

"The state says clearly that parishes can develop their own laws related to animal control, " Maloney said. "We can't hold an animal in a shelter for three years, it's inhumane."

Bandit ended up at the Lamar Dixon shelter in Gonzales, along with about 8,500 other temporarily orphaned pets. The state veterinarians association said the animals were photographed and put on the Web, at petfinder.com. But the temporary pet shelter could not stay open forever, and in October it was cleared out.

One sad family

Cavalier's search heated up in December, when he drove from Houston to the Garden District to attend a find-your-pet event. With help from the event's organizers, he learned Bandit's picture was on the Internet, but that his adoptive family did not want to give him back.

On April 27, Cavalier's advocates filed a lawsuit against the Pennsylvania family who had adopted Bandit.

"It was very clear in early October that the Cavaliers wanted Bandit back, " said Sandra Bauer, of Ontario, Canada, who jumped into the bring-Bandit-home campaign in January, after volunteer Cindi Nicotera, a librarian from Pennsylvania, met Cavalier at the Garden District event. "Some people made decisions that he wasn't coming home."

Last Friday, Lisa Fox and her family in Pennsylvania decided to let Bandit go, Bauer said, and the lawsuit was dropped. "They decided to do the right thing, " said Bauer, who with Nicotera, escorted Bandit to the 9th Ward on Thursday.

Cavalier cradled his pooch as he sat on his newly manicured front lawn, where he planted a large American flag and repaired a fountain that the storm had broken into pieces. "You can pet him, " Cavalier told a visitor. "Bandit's a good dog."

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Gwen Filosa can be reached at gfilosa@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3304.